


Four Loves

by primeideal



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Asexual Characters, Gen, Poetry, Sonnet Cycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:24:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sonnet cycle: some of the many ways that many characters have seen and enacted love, over many years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Loves

**Author's Note:**

> Non-spoilery but extensive notes at end, feel free to read those first.

So this is what love gets you in the end.  
Too many bodies round the table crowd  
Till limbs reach forward with no room to bend.  
Mouths with no food to fill them cry aloud.

We're always born into a sloppy mess,  
Blood runs thick because water's priced too dear.  
It would be easier to love the less,  
In larger rooms with fewer kindred near.

But there's no chance to stay in narrow bounds.  
Not even pressed up close against the wall  
By tiny feet producing raucous sounds.  
In spite of everything, one cares for all.

It will take risks to grow. This much, they saw.  
To save this son is to break free from law.

* * *

To save this son is to break free from law.  
But there are many sons whose light is spent.  
It's too much work to protest or to jaw  
And yet, glimpsing how all his clothes are rent...

Why lay your life down for one lying down?  
He's useless, can't even be moved to hobble.  
There are no stirrings, rolling through the town,  
Not even groans from bumping over cobble.

Whatever rapturous love pangs he might feel  
Could not dissuade him from the deadly blast.  
Only another sort of love--still real--  
Stood by him to defend him to the last,

Love for a stranger overcoming might.  
The stars shield all of them, into the night.

* * *

The stars shield all of them, into the night,  
While words are shot across the open space.  
Freedom and civic duty, wrong and right,  
The slow-won progress of the human race.

It's easier to lift up humankind  
When kindness and humanity can link  
Within a single form, a single mind  
Who thinks it all-sufficient to go think.

The struggle isn't meant for total ease  
But there are whispered moments they can share,  
And in the silent unity of these  
Liberation and more seems plenty fair.

With joint philosophy this guiding star,  
A brilliance reflects across the bar.

* * *

A brilliance reflects across the bar.  
Mirrored by transparent glass, and echoed? No.  
It scatters, again signalling how far  
The true believers' message has to go.

Humanity's on none-too-proud display,  
Stopped in its tracks by that love that distracts,  
And claims the name of love, as if to say  
That it alone is love, and hinders acts.

It chafes to think that everyone must change,  
Abandon childish faiths for grown-up whimsy,  
Faced with this false consensus, one feels strange,  
All other loves ignored or seen as flimsy.

What good's a son, a fellow-human, friend?  
So this is what love gets you in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> For Ace Amis Week. I should disclaim that I haven't actually read "Four Loves," so this may be rather speculative.
> 
> I greatly enjoyed Les Misérables from the first time I saw the musical, and part of that came from the plotline of Jean Valjean as a protagonist. I didn't really know what to expect, so it was like "okay, there's this Fantine...are they going to fall in love and be, uh, miserably happy? Um...well, I guess not, then." Unlike a lot of other musical theater protagonists, Valjean is very much the star without any standard love story on his part, and that was something that meant a lot to me.
> 
> I don't write a lot of fic in this fandom that's labeled as asexual-centric, because characters' absence of sexual attraction is rarely if ever a plot point. But I greatly enjoy writing stories about characters who, absent any sexual attraction, develop meaningful relationships and run the gamut of narratives. For this week, I wanted to do something a little different, and show off just a few of the many ways that characters who aren't experiencing sexual attraction can experience or are affected by others' experiences of love, in all its forms.
> 
> Poetry doesn't work for everyone, sometimes it doesn't work for me, so some of the vagueness may in fact be a stylistic flaw. But it was what I wanted to try, for this particular work.


End file.
